


backdrifts

by notablyindigo



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-21
Updated: 2015-02-21
Packaged: 2018-03-14 00:58:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3402572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notablyindigo/pseuds/notablyindigo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I understand that now. I accept it. I know what it means."</p>
            </blockquote>





	backdrifts

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by the final scene of ‘the female of the species’, and the theme of repair

The thing that Sherlock wonders most when he thinks about Joan Watson is how far a person can be bent before they break.

In the first days of their cohabitation in the brownstone—all prying questions, fruit smoothies, and endless prattling about meetings and recovery and process—he’d wondered it perversely, gauging her responses to his habits, his work, to see how much effort it would require to drive her away. Too much, it turned out, to be worth his time, and then before he knew it she’d grown on him like a moss. He likes to think, now, that he’s grown on her too. Into a symbiosis of sorts.

He recognizes, belatedly of course, that he’s tended more towards the parasitic in the past, taking more than he gives. He’s trying harder now, though—has been, in fits and starts, since his return to New York—but it’s not a thing that comes naturally. He voices this to Kitty one afternoon as they catch their breath after a rooftop singlestick match, and she fixes him with stern eyes, allowing for a long pause.

"You think you’re through being parasitic?" she asks, but her tone makes it sound like a statement, and a ludicrous one at that. Sherlock frowns, and has half a mind to tell her not to comment on situations she doesn’t understand. He thinks of how far he and Watson have come since the angry words delivered in the foyer on his first night back—‘There is no partnership’—, of the slow progress they’ve taken in mending things and moving back towards normalcy. But, then, how much time has he really spent with Watson since her return that didn’t revolve around cases? At least Watson and Kitty had group meetings—an area of his life which he had newly endeavored to retain separately from…well…everything, really. After squinting down at Kitty for several long moments, he accedes that she might know something about this particular situation after all.

It takes several repeated remarks from Kitty over many days for Sherlock to fully realize that he’s not actually paused to actually talk to Watson since his return—not about her cases or Andrew or Clyde’s terrarium maintenance, but about the woman herself. The stunned expression on her face when he finally does ask after her, as they examine the detritus of Clay Burbrovensky’s life, speaks volumes, most of them on the subject of his negligence.

Perhaps he should write a monograph on the matter.

* * *

 

Sherlock will admit it to no one, but he is a bit wounded, if not unsurprised, by Watson’s decision to call him about Andrew only after she’s already called Detective Bell. By the time he makes it to the hospital, Watson is already explaining things to a distraught Mr. and Mrs. Mittal, with Bell standing at her elbow. He notices from afar that she holds a wadded bit of kleenex in a clenched fist, but if there had been tears shed, Sherlock sees little trace of them on Watson’s face. As he approaches, however, he notices the tiny droplets of water at her hairline that indicate a recent washing up. How like her, he thinks, to project absurd strength even at a moment like this.

It occurs to him that, of course, he has seen this from her before.

* * *

 

Sherlock has long wondered what the last days of Watson’s surgery career looked like—not cruelly, as he might have done when she first arrived and he realized what she was, but more as a component of a study of character. To what extent was the Joan Watson he had come to know a product of her traumas, and what had she been before?

But, of course, is there ever truly a ‘before’? Is there ever a remembered time in one’s life that remains untouched by some teratogenic pain? Before the matter with Gerald Castoro there had been, he was sure, a litany of injuries both great and small in Watson’s life, each with its own effect. It had taken thirty five years for her to arrive at the upheaval large enough to shift her course completely and, perhaps by an act of providence, deliver her to to the brownstone and into his life. And yet, from the moment they’d met, it had taken a scant two years for Watson to triple what she doubtlessly considered to be her body count.

When she was recovered from her abduction, she hadn’t said a word to him about the dead man from Le Milieu, and Sherlock had accepted that as her desire not to discuss the matter. This had been his first mistake. Later, when Watson was two days into what would eventually end up being a week’s worth of sleepless nights, he’d listened to the soft tread of her feet on the floorboards of the bedroom above his, the glowing clock face on his bedside table reading 3:17AM, and determined that she would talk about it when she was ready. And this, of course, had been his second mistake, for more than anyone else he knew—more, perhaps, than even he himself—Joan Watson was not one to voluntarily bare her soul.

What he should have done, he realized (again, belatedly, months later while on a sombre, foggy stroll through Hyde Park), was request that she accompany him for breakfast, or perhaps even on a run, and then tell her that, in spite of her protests to the contrary, he knew she was in fact _not_ fine. That it was fine not to be fine, but that he was there if she wanted to talk about it, that he had contacts with all manner of remote cabins and apartments and cubbyholes where they (or she) could retreat to for a time, if that was what she wished. That the risk of alarming her mother shouldn’t keep her from confiding in her family. That, much as he believed in her and had confidence in her strength, he was worried about her.

As a follower of the scientific method, Sherlock Holmes is determined not to make the same mistake again.

He returns to the brownstone from the hospital and spends the evening making a large, somewhat over-baked, lasagne.

* * *

 

_There’s another body to add to my ever-growing ledger._

Sherlock can practically see the thought scrolling behind Watson’s eyes as she tells him about Elana March’s murder, about Gregson’s useless plans to find and interrogate Moriarty.

"I feel okay," she says. A lie. "I feel clear about something." Sherlock prepares to deliver words—the right words, this time—about her blamelessness and the depravity of their shared sociopath. _You are not to blame,_ he would say. _You’re safe. We will make sure you’re safe_.

But count on Joan Watson to surprise him with entirely different concerns.

"It’s ridiculous for me to think that I can have a normal life," she says softly. "I’m not going to do that anymore." There’s defeat in her voice, in the low cast of her eyes and the forward roll of her shoulders. All those reassurances dry up in his mouth and leave him with nothing to say. She meets his gaze, and he knows what’s coming.

"I want to come back to the brownstone," she says, and where there should be elation he finds only a remote sense of queasiness churning in the pit of his stomach. How long has he hoped, in spite of himself, to hear her say precisely those words, only for them to sound so hollow now?

It should be an active decision, he knows—a deliberate choice to live this life, rather than a slouching towards it, a process of elimination. _You should be here because you want to be_ , he thinks, _not because you feel that it’s all you deserve._ He almost says this to her, tries to find a way to frame it without making it sound like a rejection. _I want you here more than anything,_ he thinks achingly, auditioning the words, _but I don’t think that’s what you actually want_.

But she looks at him then, with an expression like she might break under the wrong remark, and her unexpected fragility in that moment is such that he fears it might crack him in two. He sweeps an arm at the room around them, taking in Angus, the fireplace, the lock grid, the trappings of their world.

"Welcome back, Watson," he says.

_For now._


End file.
